Jessica Collier, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory: Hi, everyone. Thanks for watching this video. My name is Jessica Collier, and I will walk through some of our current modeling efforts and future work referencing the U.S. DOE Prototype Building Models. The DOE Prototype Building Models were originally developed in 2011 under the Building Energy Codes program and they represent approximately 80% of the commercial building stock in the United States.
The models cover 16 building types, including multiple office models, retail, education, health care, multifamily residential, warehouse, and hospitality environments. And while the amount of information provided varies between building types, all the models contain inputs regarding the building massing and construction type, the total floor area, other building system requirements, and environmental conditions, and include typical operating schedules for equipment and people like the ones pictured here representing lighting load and building occupancy for a typical weekday.
These schedules are typically represented as a fraction of a whole and represent the entire building. The models were originally put together to serve as a common baseline to measure the progress of DOE's energy efficiency goals and provide consistency in modeling approaches and subsequent analysis across commercial building types.
And as a result, the models were expressed in EnergyPlus and Excel, and were intended to be used primarily by building research scientists, technical committees, and the Codes and Standards program to assess new technologies, explore design options and their impacts, analyze advanced control strategies, or just further develop the codes and standards themselves.
In 2014, the models were updated to determine the energy impact of later versions of ASHRAE Standard 90.1 and include the new technological capabilities or control mechanisms written in the standards for analysis. At this time, the medium office building prototype had a single space type labeled office. And so for example, the prototype occupancy schedule tells us that the building is 10% occupied at 7:00 AM, but it doesn't tell us where those occupants are or how they are interacting with the space.
In 2019, OpenStudio models were developed for several office prototype buildings that included interior layouts which are shown here. With this level of detail, it's possible to kind of map occupants and equipment to a specific space type that may have more targeted code or occupant requirements than just sort of labeling everything office.
Creating the models in OpenStudio allowed access to cloud computing environments and provided greater simulation and analysis flexibility, which matches this additional level of detail and resolution available in the model.
As I mentioned previously, these models exist to serve as a common baseline for building researchers to measure the comparative impact of new technologies or designs. So we decided to use them to explore several use cases surrounding space utilization, occupancy, and lighting system use, grid flexibility and resilience, as well as exploring the digital tools and workflows necessary to support a lighting system from design through operation, for example.
And when we asked ourselves what information we think we’ll actually need to answer these questions, we found that we were really looking for higher resolution answers than the prototype models we're providing as inputs. We also wanted to use the models for different purposes than they were originally intended like exploring the connection between software tools and the quality of the built environment just for example. So we knew we had to do some slight modifications to get the models into a place that we could use them for our work.
We started with this medium office prototype building model as a reference and proceeded with modifications best suited to our own work. It's important to note that these modifications will not be part of the official DOE Prototype Building Models but are things that we developed to complete our own research.
Then if we cut that exterior shell open, we can see the interior architecture that we designed and modeled with the same space types as the 2019 modifications. Some of these space types include enclosed and open offices, conference rooms, mechanical and storage spaces, and a place to have your lunch, for example. Next, we layered in a typical furniture layout, which is really used to dictate occupancy levels in a given space.
We wanted to vary the number of occupants and the types of office space that occupants could use by floor to investigate how different operational strategies or number of occupants in a given space influences the lighting system use in addition to the standard schedules and strategies that are proposed in the original prototype building models. Then we can also use these space types to kind of define boundary conditions for simulation or analyses to express which spaces are regularly occupied maybe versus spaces that are not.
Then we added a specific lighting layout to more accurately quantify lighting power use and different control strategies. The layout is based on typical luminaires from a standard ASHRAE database covering three different code years, including a 2004 building area method baseline which is provided in the DOE Prototype Building Model. A 2010 model using the space-by-space method and two 2019 designs, one using static color temperature LED products and one using tunable LED products in select spaces.
The lighting layout includes seven luminaire types with a few additional size or distribution modifications embedded within those seven like including a 1 by 4, 2 by 2, and 2 by 4 troffer. Preliminary lighting zones have also been specified but could become a study variable to investigate multiple control strategies or the impact of the size of the control zones in an office space.
Typically, building energy simulations assume the maximum connected lighting load allowed by code because more specific information is simply not available. But by specifying representative luminaires, we can use a more realistic and technology specific LED in our calculations and simulations.
Lastly, we decided to build our version of the prototype building in Revit as opposed to OpenStudio or EnergyPlus, or just define these updates in Excel because we wanted to explore the flow of data in and out of Revit as a building information modeling tool.
As a standard tool in current practice, Revit has the capabilities to store and associate architectural metadata about its rooms, fixtures, occupants, and other building components. And then it's possible to extract some of this information and share it with a cloud environment or another database tool to be able to query the architecture in new ways.
So we are intending to share these refinements in Revit and Rhino with all the building metadata that we've captured in the Revit modeling environment. And over the course of the next year or so, we plan to use this detailed model to conduct studies that will begin to shape connected lighting systems flexibility to respond to grid events. We also plan to investigate a variety of occupancy and operational states to measure the impact on building performance and typically used energy efficiency metrics like lighting power density and energy use intensity.
Finally, we are hoping to use the exported metadata as a faster way to begin semantically modeling a building and query that model based on use cases and workflows driven by the industry with a goal of aligning all phases of design, construction, and operation of a building. So thank you for watching. Please feel free to reach out to us if you have any other questions or use case ideas for us to explore. Otherwise, we look forward to speaking with you on the second.